Category Archives: Uncategorized

Naked Promo: My talk on Blair Inc at Waterstones in Berkhamsted

Posted on by

Blair INCIf you want to find out the story behind  my new book Blair Inc which I co-authored with Francis Beckett and Nick Kochan you can come along to my local branch of Waterstones next Thursday ( April 23) at 7.0pm.

For a modest fee of £3 – which can be claimed back as a discount against a copy – I will attempt to explain how we went about gathering information about the former Prime Minister after he left office in 2007 to the present day.

The book is unusual in that it concentrates entirely on Blair after he left government. It attempts to show how he and his family  became rich and the complex structure he and Cherie set up to hide where the money comes from.

It also includes a critical look at his role as Middle East economic envoy – a job which he may well have to give up according to recent press reports – as little progress has been made.

There is also some interesting findings about  how Blair and Peter Mandelson, once his closest friend, have gone their separate ways to make money through advising foreign entrepreneurs, governments , oligarchs and dictators.

This will be your chance to ask any questions you may have – whether you are an ardent Blairite or believe Blair destroyed his reputation over the war in Iraq.. Some come along – it’s a good time to debate his role in the middle of a general election campaign and a change from all those hustings.

Banned by the British courts: A VIP’s book on how he was sexually abused

Posted on by

In an era when child sexual abuse is literally coming out of the closet, an extraordinary decision has been taken by a British court to ban a book from an eminent performing artist on how he survived abuse as a child.

A judge has upheld an injunction bought by the man’s son to avoid publication on the grounds it would cause psychological damage to his son if the public knew about his father’s early life at school.

I am indebted to the excellent Inforrm blog for this story.You can read the full report by Dan Tench, a lawyer from Olswang, here.

The book was described in court as Inforrm reports as bringing together these terrible experiences “in an artistic and insightful way” and to be in “striking prose” and, it was said, contained “an important message of encouragement to those who have suffered similar abuse to speak about their past”.

But the man had a son by a marriage now dissolved.  That son lived abroad (in a country quaintly termed “Ruritania” in the judgment) with his mother.  The son suffered from a combination of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Asperger’s, Dysgraphia and Dyspraxia.  Two psychologists said that the publication of the book revealing such details of his father would be likely to “exert a catastrophic effect on [his] self-esteem and to cause him enduring psychological harm”.

The injunction was granted by Lady Justice Arden using a bizarre piece of English law. As Dan Tench reports that:

“the publication of the book would be contrary to the tort of intentionally inflicting mental suffering as originally established in Wilkinson v Downton [1897] QB 57.  Amazingly, this ground was sufficient for the boy to secure his injunction.

Wilkinson v Downton is a legal curiosity well-known to legal students.  In it, a man as a practical joke had told a woman that her husband had had a serious accident.  She had responded badly to the information and had suffered nervous shock.  She was entitled to recover compensation for the psychological damage.  It appears to remain good law, albeit rather rarely used.”

To fit the bill Lady Justice Arden decided this should apply if the claim was true rather than false and that because of the internet the boy could read it. As she put it : “the relevant information was disseminated to the world at large, provided there was a risk that it would be received by the boy (he was said to be “computer savvy” and may read it via the Internet). ”

Finally the argument was used, among others, that the boy might visit London and be able to see a copy of the book.

Dan Tench concludes “The judgement is perhaps best seen as simply a rogue decision which hopefully will be quickly put out of its misery by the Supreme Court.  But if not, we have a precedent binding on the courts of first instance and the Court of Appeal which will cause all manner of difficulties.”

I would go much further. To my mind to ban a book using case law based on practical jokers to stop someone writing about child sexual abuse is a sick joke in itself. I hope this outrageous ban is lifted as soon as possible.

Update: Today the Telegraph reports that a group of eminent authors including William Boyd and sir Tom Stoppard have objected to the ban.

 

News: Phone Hacking, former NoW news editor Ian Edmondson finally pleads guilty

Posted on by

Ian Edmondson , former News of the World news editor,has now admitted he did hack phones – the chilling point is rhe admission by his own QC that the problem is ” industry wide ” and he was under ” direct instructions from senior executives ” to do it.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

Ian EdmondsonThe former News of the World News Editor, Ian Edmondson today pleaded guilty to conspiracy to intercept voicemails between 3 October 2000 and 9 August 2006. Mr Edmondson had pleaded not guilty to this charge on 6 June 2013.

View original post 469 more words

The Hacking Trial Costs Issue – News UK withdraw their claim for millions: Saunders’ Memo

Posted on by

A rather crucial debate has been denied by the decision of News UK to withdraw their claim for millions of pounds of costs after the acquittal of Rebekah Brooks and others in the hacking trial. The judge was about to ask the Attorney General for advice on whether he should look at the conduct of News UK in the phone hacking scandal as he had the discretion to do so. News UK seem to have decided that rather than have that debated they would withdraw their claim for £7m costs.

peterjukes's avatarThe Criminal Media Nexus

Back in June, when Rebekah Brooks, Stuart Kuttner, Cheryl Carter and Mark Hanna were all acquitted at the phone hacking trial, their barristers made it clear they would be applying (as is their right) for a refund of their court costs. Already, at this point, it was clear that News UK would have to be party to these hearings on costs, since they had indemnified all the cleared defendants bar Charlie Brooks. The initial quantum for that claim was reported to be £25 million in legal costs. This was reduced two weeks ago to £7 million by the Crown Prosecution Service on the basis of equivalent legal aid, rather than private, legal costings. 

View original post 1,394 more words

Why the Church has to atone for decades of child sexual abuse

Posted on by

Just before I went on holiday I penned a piece for Exaro on moves under discussion by the Anglican and Methodists to start tackling  the huge legacy of child sexual abuse by priests and teachers employed by the church..

For once it was more optimistic piece suggesting that at long last church leaders were realising that they had to say more than sorry and had to start taking responsibility for what had happened and is still happening.

I was  a bit taken aback to find some strong Twitter responses suggesting that overnight I had turned from an investigative journalist to an apologist for the Anglican church and a budding correspondent for Church Times. Ironically it came just as the Church appear to think that I might have gone too far in highlighting what they were contemplating before they had reached a final decision.

The piece on the Exaro website highlights the work of the joint safeguarding liaison group for Anglicans and Methodists which is now looking at earmarking money to three groups – including the Lantern project in Wirral – to provide counselling for church sex abuse victims. This move is by itself welcome – given counselling has not been properly provided for thousands of victims whatever the government may like to claim.

The campaign group, Stop Church Child Abuse, says that hundreds of clergy with claims against them of child abuse have not been prosecuted, pointing out that safeguarding procedures allow bishops to keep such allegations away from the authorities. These procedures may not be changed.

Also Exaro has established that the CoE was pressing the government more than a year ago to set up a full-scale inquiry into child sex abuse in a range of institutions in the UK – long before Theresa May, the home secretary, decided to set up an independent panel and when David Cameron was being at best equivocal and at worst ignoring the scale of the problem.

I make no apologies for reporting some of the more positive moves by the Church. But make no mistake I will continue to pursue the issue and investigate the large number of cases where the authorities have failed and people’s lives ruined as a result.

 

 

 

Hidden Brittany: The petit delights of Dol-de-Bretagne

Posted on by
Mont St Michel: Viewed from the almost deserted Dol Marsh

Mont St Michel: Viewed from the almost deserted Dol Marsh

Just back from a two week break in Brittany with the grandkids where to my surprise very little has changed once you get off the motorways. Rural France has empty roads, open spaces and places to visit without meeting the crowds at the height of the tourist season. Indeed two places we visited which commanded just a sentence in the Michelin Green Guide we had to ourselves.

Our destination was a busy campsite just outside the medieval town of Dol-de-Bretagne – a place which is more likely to attract French tourists than the English – and most of the people do not speak English. It also stages a medieval tournament in August celebrating the rivalries in France once the English had been defeated!

Once away from the huge international tourist Des Ormes campsite with its five swimming pools, horse riding,golf and zip wire, you can find places that have hardly changed in centuries.

View from Mount Dol over Brittany and the coast

View from Mount Dol over Brittany and the coast

Most popular with us was Mont Dol -a 208 foot high granite mound. approached by a narrow road with a midway hairpin bend. Despite its diminutive size- it offers stupendous views stretching for miles across the Brittany-Normandy border, a tower, an old windmill, picnic area, children’s playground and a creperie.

Going to collect cockles and mussels French style

Going to collect cockles and mussels French style

In front of the mound lies a bit of France that resembles  coastal Norfolk and Suffolk – a large expanse of salt marshes and drained farmland with dykes. Here only a few miles from the overcrowded  mega tourist attraction of Mont St Michael are deserted bays, huge open skies, roads and tracks only frequented by cyclists and people searching for cockles and mussels.

Ruined castle at Hede

Ruined castle at Hede

Inland were the towns of Combourg – which has its own cheese – and Hede. The former has a lake and a chateau , the latter is on a hill with a ruined castle where we had the place to ourselves and the grandkids discovered a secret passage. The only public warning was not to nick the stones.

Friendly lemur at the zoo

Friendly lemur at the zoo

We also discovered a more popular zoo at a Bourbansais Chateau. – again set in gardens with everything from lions to lemurs. It also had its own pack of hunting dogs who put on a daily display – without killing anything!

Cheeky grandson Leon in the ruined cloisters at Le Tronchet

Cheeky grandson Leon in the ruined cloisters at Le Tronchet

But probably the quietest spot was a a half ruined former Benedictine abbey at Le Tronchet – a small village- which turned out to have a garden attached to it with picnic tables. Again apart from two French cyclists we had the place to ourselves.

It’s still great to know that you can find places in August where you can get away from the crowds if you want peace and quiet- even with four grandchildren.

 

How the government lets your car reveal how much disability benefit you receive?

Posted on by
DVLA -revealing disability benefits via car regostration

DVLA -revealing disability benefits via car regostration

With the tabloid media frenzy on cheating benefit claimants reaching new heights and people believing that some disabled people are fraudsters, the government seems to have found a new way to embarrass people on benefit.

The forthcoming abolition of car tax discs  from October means that the only way to check whether a vehicle is taxed is to check free on line at the Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA). All anybody needs is the vehicle registration and the make of car – you don’t even need to know the model.

But the DVLA has decided to introduce a new  way of reporting  on line who doesn’t have to pay car tax  by creating a class of taxation called disabled.revealing whether the person who drives it is disabled rather than leaving it blank as previously.

As I reported in Tribune under the new system, people can find out on line that they pay no car tax, which is only available to people claiming higher levels of benefit. This is through mobility benefit included in the Disability Living Allowance or the new personal Independence payment system, and for war pensioners who have mobility supplements. The site also says whether they are disabled or not.

The changes highlighted on a professionally run benefits and advice website have provoked a storm of protest from disabled people who see it as a breach of privacy and revealing confidential information.

The website says: “The issue here appears to be one of data protection. The information that DVLA are making available is not about the vehicle itself. Instead they are publishing personal information about the benefits received by the individual who currently owns the car or for whom the car is solely used.”

One disabled person, Robert Adam commented: “There are malicious gits out there who resent people getting benefits who are 100 per cent entitled to them. If someone is accused of fraudulently obtaining the Disability Living Allowance, they are immediately pulled in for the new PIP assessment. This DVLA system stating “Taxation class disabled” is not information about the vehicle. It is information about the registered keeper being disabled and entitled to free road tax.”

The DVLA say this is not their intention. They claim their aim is to help people when the numerous parking companies are chasing up people for unpaid parking fines and private parking charges who will be saved from being pursued when they see their entry.

However given the DVLA is also making over £20m by handing over the names and addresses of people driving or keeping the cars to private enforcement companies at a cost of £2.50 a time they are not always that scrupulous. After all many of the parking charges sought by private companies are not enforceable any way as this site reveals and this story on BBC News also illustrates.

It strikes me as just another way of ratcheting up fear of  suspected benefit fraud while at the same time making money from some unscrupulous parking cowboys.

Class War 2014: The Rich Kids of Snapchat

Posted on by
Bullingdon : The earlier generation before Rich Kids on Snapshot

Bullingdon : The earlier generation before Rich Kids of Snapshot

If ever David Cameron’s claim that we are all in it together needed to be proved false, look at a site on Facebook called the Rich Kids of Snapchat.

Set up by a 17 year old British public schoolboy and liked by 244,000 people this site celebrates the life style of the super rich public schoolboys – the new generation expecting to run Britain in a decade or so.

Far from having any concern for the rest of us, this ” fun ” site worships money, fast cars, Gucci, luxury yachts and private jets,champagne and has an unhealthy interest in guns.

It is virtually the calling card of the new ” Bullingdon Club ” and the kids know they are the new ” boss class ” – the future generation of Tory Cabinet ministers, entrepreneurs and flashy businessmen and bankers. And some will have the vote in next year’s election,

Among the fun pictures are kids using £50 notes as toilet paper, £20 notes for tablecloths, handling guns to protect their estates from the ” peasants”, and commuting from home to public school by private helicopters or showing they have a £10m private bank account at Coutts.

Not surprisingly this has produced a reaction across the net with people calling for the site to be taken down, and a spate of hostile comments – sometimes producing ripostes like warning people to shut up as they will be their boss in future life.

More seriously as the Inforrm blog reveals  these antics have posed problems for the more mature seriously rich parents who wish to hide their opulent life styles from the rest of us and pretend “we are all in it together”.

As the Inforrm blog says : ” The consequences could be very serious for those wealthy teens, and their families, where potentially inflammatory images appear which include identifying information such as faces, car registrations and locations.

One 19 year old, who frequently posted about his lavish lifestyle and who was featured on Tumblr site “Rich Kids on Instagram”, has already run into trouble, having had several luxury cars from his father’s rental business subsequently set alight by vandals, causing over £500,000 worth of damage to his father’s business.

Another featured ‘rich kid’ was Alexa Dell, daughter of Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell, who posted an image of her brother tucking into a feast onboard a private jet, bound for Fiji. She also used her Twitter account to regularly post details of her location, complete with GPS location tagging- somewhat undermining the annual US$2.7 million her father reportedly spends on family security.  Upon discovering this, Alexa’s account was removed and her image has been taken down.”

The blog rightly points out that in an era of unemployment and  poverty where ceo’s have made people redundant  this  can be inflammatory.

It rightly adds:” a teen bragging about the lavish lifestyle of his or her CEO parent who has recently made redundancies or been the recipient of a sizeable bonus can easily catch the eye of a journalist on the hunt for a story – as can any images posted by a naive child who has a parent in the public eye. ”

But to me the whole site seems symptomatic of a yawning divide opening up in the UK and the last thing I would want to see is it taken down. Such antics provide the perfect foil to attack the wealthy Lynton Crosby and the image he wants the Tories to present to the electorate of the ruling class in the next election. Spoilt brats revealing themselves for what they really are!

Meanwhile in true entrepreneurial fashion the site is up for sale by its 17 year old owner. He has been offered $150,000 by an American but might let it go for a mere $40,000 to a Brit with spare cash from his pocket money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Child Sex Abuse Inquiry: An all party victory for MPs and abuse victims

Posted on by

No one would have thought a week ago that Theresa May, the home secretary, would have announced today an overarching inquiry into child sexual abuse.

The odds were stacked against it for the last two years as David Cameron kept insisting that police investigations had to go first before there could be any inquiry.

Today it all changed. and it was discovered that it was perfectly possible to have both an all embracing independent inquiry and complete the current police investigations at the same time.

The reason why this changed is a combination of persistent journalism, determined abuse victims and their campaigners and a group of very, very determined MPs who put  pressure on the Prime Minister and the Home secretary to act.

The biggest victors today are the child abuse victims – whose stories have been ignored, their suffering played down, and their search for justice thwarted for decades.

Now they will have – even if it takes a couple of years to complete – the promise of a tough, vigilant independent panel that will explore all avenues from  the failure to detect these scandals to how  victims can get proper help to cope with their  damaged lives. If it uses its power to abstract information from the security services and special branch we may well get to the bottom of why prominent people were protected and were safe for decades to practice their vile pursuits..

Rumours suggest that Theresa May  wants to appoint a powerful woman to run the inquiry  which would  send a powerful signal to male dominated Whitehall and Parliament that it means business.

Credit must be paid to hundreds of Twitter followers of Exaro and myself who raised questions with MPs – a powerful use of  new media to change minds and bring attention directly to the people involved./ Without Twitter it would have been much slower and more difficult to achieve the goal.

Tribute must be paid to some tireless MP campaigners – to Zac Goldsmith for the idea of all party approach, to Tom Watson for his gutsy raising of difficult questions and championing abuse victims, to Simon Danczuk for his persistence in pursuing the paedophile Sir Cyril Smith and to the heroic former children’s minister, Tim Loughton, for his organising skills and determination to seek justice and a new system of child protection that could change the climate in this country. Tessa Munt’s skills in honing the letter to the home secretary was crucial in pushing through the case.

For once I would say  the good side of Parliament has triumphed in representing the views of an outraged public who are still reeling from the exposure of loved household celebrities as paedophiles and wanted to see things changed.

Also I hope when journalism has suffered grievous damage from the phone hacking scandal  it has shown that there are investigative journalists – all my colleagues at Exaro – who are prepared to spend  time, energy and fortitude to try and expose accurately and carefully a national scandal and then campaign to get something done. I wish more journalists would do it.

 

 

 

It’s grim down under: Australia, Murdoch and political control – Granville Williams

Posted on by

While the jury is out on the phone hacking trial, this rather damning article reveals that Murdoch never sleeps and is already planning to consolidate his overwhelming power in Australia with the help of Australia’s new Murdoch friendly PM,Tony Abbott. Granville Williams rightly says the issue of media ownership is a major political issue and should be raised in the run up to the general election in the UK.

INFORRM's avatarInforrm's Blog

AbbottMurdochA report in the Brisbane Times, 12 June 2014, revealed Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin, spent more than 2½ hours at Mr Murdoch’s apartment near Central Park in New York on Tuesday evening, 10 June.

View original post 808 more words